Crop insurance can help protect farmers from large losses resulting from crop failure or unusually large drops in crop prices. Subsidized crop insurance makes crop production less risky and more profitable. Recent ERS research suggests that crop insurance has small effects on environmental quality in the Corn Belt region.

Highly Erodible Land Conservation (HELC) contributed significantly to soil erosion reduction. For erosion due to rainfall, the average erosion reduction on land subject to HELC was 40 percent more than on similar land not subject to HELC.

Conservation Compliance, which links eligibility for farm program benefits to soil and wetland conservation, has significantly reduced soil erosion on highly erodible cropland. The 2014 Farm Act eliminated some benefits subject to Compliance under the 2008 Act (e.g., Direct Payments) but also linked some benefits that were not subject to Compliance (e.g., crop insurance premium subsidies).

While most agricultural commodities are wind-pollinated, about one-third of total U.S. food consumption either require or benefit from insect pollination. Managed honeybees alone provide over $350 million worth of pollinatoion services each year. Recently, however, the health of pollinators has suffered.

Farmers can improve their drought resilience by making different crop choices, enrolling in crop insurance and other farm risk management programs, and investing in soil health. USDA conservation programs—intended primarily to improve on-site and off-site environmental quality—may also help producers adapt to drought risk.

The irrigation of agricultural crops accounts for most of the Nation’s water consumption. To better understand irrigation characteristics, such as acreage and water use, USDA conducts the Farm and Ranch Irrigation Survey (FRIS) every 5 years. Most irrigated farms are low-sales operations, but large farms use most of the water.

This collection of 34 charts and maps presents examples of key statistics on the farm sector, food spending and prices, food security, rural communities, agricultural production and trade, the interaction of agriculture and natural resources, and more found in ERS's regularly updated web product, Ag and Food Statistics: Charting the Essentials.

In 2015, the Organic Trade Association estimated U.S. organic retail sales at $43.3 billion, showing double-digit growth during most years since 2000, when USDA set national organic standards. Since setting national organic standards, USDA has streamlined trade arrangements with multiple foreign governments to expand international markets for U.S. organic producers.

Three common precision agricultural information technologies are global positioning system (GPS) guidance systems, GPS yield and soil monitors/maps, and variable-rate input application technologies (VRT). Research shows these technologies had similar positive, but small, impacts on corn profits of between 1 and 3 percent in 2010.

In 2012, 35 percent of active farm and ranch land was in counties overlaying a shale play (shale counties). In 2014, about 6 percent of U.S. farm businesses averaged $56,000 in lease and royalty payments from energy production.

Nutrient trading is a strategy in which polluters with high costs of reducing pollution can pay farmers to limit nutrient runoff into the Chesapeake Bay. But nutrient trading is more complex for livestock operations than for crop farms.

Soil health builds upon soil conservation by encouraging farmers to manage soil as a living ecosystem, in addition to reducing soil erosion. Healthy soils can have benefits to society and to farmers. USDA incentivizes farmers to adopt soil health practices through programs such as EQIP and CSP.

No-till and strip-till are two of many tillage methods farmers use to plant crops. During 2010-11, roughly 56 percent of all U.S. land used for corn, cotton, soybeans, and wheat was located on farms that used no-till/strip-till on at least some portion of this cropland.

U.S. irrigated fieldcrop acreage, and water used, are projected to decline with long-term climate change, due to factors including changes in precipitation, shifts in surface-water availability, and temperature-stressed crop growth.

Irrigation is widely viewed as an important adaptation to shifting production conditions under climate change. This analysis projects, however, that irrigated fieldcrop acreage will decline as a result of climate change over the 2020 to 2080 study period. Factors driving the shifting relative profitability of irrigation under climate change vary by region.

The Gulf of Mexico’s hypoxic zone stems in part from an excess of nutrients, including nitrogen. An estimated 60-80 percent of the nitrogen delivered to the Gulf of Mexico is from agriculture, despite some farmers’ adoption of on-field nitrogen conservation practices. Nitrogen removal benefits of wetlands and restoration costs vary substantially across the Upper Mississippi/Ohio River watersheds.